Month: April 2018

Recently, Coinbase acquired task-platform Earn.com. Coinbase is an online platform for users and merchants to buy, sell, and accept cryptocurrencies. For these activities Coinbase has three different products: gdax exchange: buying and selling of cryptocurrencies for institutional and professional investors Coinbase.com: buying and selling of cryptocurrencies for „mainstream“ users Coinbase Commerce: merchants payment systems for accepting cryptocurrency payments Earn.com is a task-platform where users earn bitcoin for completing tasks. The tasks are offered by blockchain startups doing an ICO and involve things like signing up for newsletters or joining telegram groups. Those blockchain startups are very often in an early phase and Earn.com serves as a marketing tool for them. Some argue that the acquisition was an acqui-hire for Earn founder and CEO Balaji Srinivasan. And Balaji Srinivasan, who has an impressive track record (among other things as partner at Andreessen Horowitz) is now indeed Coinbase’s CTO. Whereas acqui-hiring Balaji Srinivasan might be the acquisition’s real intention, looking at the acquisition in the context of Coinbase’s other acquisitions and their self-imposed company description shows another perspective, namely that Coinbase is building a “crypto empire“ serving a user’s whole „crypto lifecycle“. Building a crypto empire with Earn.com, Cipher Browser, Coinbase.com, and